Czech politics in crisis over 2014 ammo depot explosions as President refuses to accept intelligence reports blaming Russia
By Jonny Tickle | RT | May 17, 2021
The Czech Republic’s internal spat over the 2014 ammunition depot explosions shows no signs of calming down, with President Milos Zeman refusing to accept Prague’s security service’s conclusions that Russia is to blame.
The dispute has now become so intense that both the country’s Prime Minister Andrej Babis and Minister of Justice Marie Benesova have gone on the attack against Zeman.
In October and December 2014, explosions took place at arms depots in Vrbetice, killing two people. Last month, Czech First Deputy Prime Minister Jan Hamacek revealed that the country’s authorities believe they know the identities of two men supposedly responsible for the explosions, and both allegedly work for Russian military intelligence.
Following the revelations, Prague expelled 18 of Russia’s diplomats, before later announcing that the Russian Embassy in the capital would be reduced to match the size of the Czech delegation in Moscow.
However, despite the conclusions of his country’s intelligence services, the Czech president is not convinced. Speaking on Sunday, Zeman told radio station Frekvence 1 that he is not convinced that there is only one explanation for the explosions, noting that he trusted the country’s police, but did not trust the security and information service. In particular, he suggested that the incidents were staged to cover up a shortage.
In response, Babis explained that there is only one theory for what happened.
“I explained to the president that the police are investigating only one version [of the story],” Babis said, according to Russian news agency RIA Novosti. “It is possible that there were more versions [in the past]. But I can’t explain why the president insists that there is more than one version [today].”
Justice head Benesova also backed up the prime minister, noting that the country only has one theory, blaming Russian military intelligence.
Moscow has denied any involvement, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov calling the allegations “inflammatory and unfriendly.”
Sunday’s attack on Gaza City claims 42 civilian lives
Mourners pray over the bodies of Palestinians killed in overnight Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on 16 May. (Atia Darwish APA images)
Palestine Information Center – May 17, 2021
GAZA – The health ministry in the Gaza Strip said that a total of 42 civilians were killed and 50 others suffered injuries, some seriously, in the horrific massacre that was committed by Israeli warplanes at dawn Sunday in al-Wehda neighborhood in Gaza City.
Deputy health minister Yousef Abul-Rish told a news conference on Sunday evening that the weapons that were used in the bombing of the neighborhood tore the children’s bodies apart and made them unrecognizable.
Abul-Rish said that two doctors, Mu’ein al-Aloul and Ayman Abul-Auf, were killed in the aerial attack on al-Wehda neighborhood.
He accused Israel of deliberately bombing and destroying vital facilities and sectors that are needed to provide water, electricity and health services as well as roads that lead to hospitals.
The health official also accused Israel of obstructing the work of medical crews through targeting ambulances and paramedics and preventing them from reaching bombed areas to evacuate casualties.
According to the latest statistics from the health ministry in Gaza, the number of Palestinians killed, since the Israeli military aggression against the Gaza Strip started on May 10, has now risen to 197 martyrs, including 58 children and 34 women.
More than 1,235 others have also been wounded so far amid the ongoing brutal Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Report: COVID vaccine adverse effects, huge numbers
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | May 17, 2021
A long-standing private organization, the National Vaccine Information Center, has analyzed the US government’s database, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
As of May 7, 2021, VAERS lists 192,954 adverse-event reports associated with COVID vaccines. [1]
These events cover the spectrum from mild transient effects to death.
VAERS has always has multiple problems.
One: Doctors aren’t required by law to report adverse effects. Many of them wouldn’t risk blowback by doing so.
Two: There is no comprehensive effort to determine whether an adverse effect is actually caused by a vaccine.
Three: Patients can make adverse-effect reports—but are often hesitant to do so.
Four: By far the biggest problem is: most Americans aren’t even aware that VAERS exists.
Therefore, on balance, UNDER-REPORTING adverse effects is the primary defect of VAERS.
Many efforts have been made to estimate the degree of under-reporting. These estimates state the VAERS numbers should be multiplied by 10, all the way to 100, to obtain an accurate picture of adverse effects.
Ten times the current number of COVID vaccine adverse effects would equal 1,929,540. A hundred times the current number=19,295,400. Either way, the number is staggering.
The death reports are escalating by the day. As of May 7—4,057.
Here are other very troubling categories of VAERS adverse effects, as of May 7. Permanent Disability=2,475. Doctor’s Office Visit=32,801. Emergency Doctor/Room=25,566. Hospitalized=11,538. Birth Defect=112. Life-Threatening=3,548.
Yet, public officials and news outlets continue to repeat the mantra, “safe and effective,” and urge everyone to take the shot.
Every person who receives the vaccine is supposed to be informed of the risks beforehand. I assure you NO ONE is being given these adverse effect numbers, plus the advice to multiply the numbers by 10 or 100.
Lack of informed consent runs contrary to every medical code.
I can also assure you the FDA, which is considering whether to give full approval to the current COVID vaccines, isn’t multiplying the adverse-effect numbers by 10 or 100.
Here is something else to consider. Even multiplying the VAERS numbers by 100 may not be sufficient, because the RNA COVID shots are employing a new technology which a) has never been used on the public before and b) isn’t a vaccine at all; it’s a genetic treatment.
As I’ve shown in recent articles, the entire field of genetic research is riddled with lies, pretense, and unpredictable ripple-effect consequences. The notion of inserting a single genetic change into a person and limiting its effects to an announced goal is a fiction. Unexpected changes occur. And their negative disruptive effects, long-term, are unknown.
Those effects will never be listed in any database.
SOURCE:
[1] https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?TABLE=ON&GROUP1=CAT&EVENTS=ON&VAX=COVID19
Covid scaremongering – the government’s £1bn blitz
By Frederick Edward | Conservative Woman | May 17, 2021
WHOEVER controls the flow of information controls the narrative. I recently looked at the government’s reliance on polling through partners such as YouGov. Today I return to the role of the wider media.
A few months ago I wrote about the government’s Covid-related advertising expenditure. In late spring 2020, all Covid-19 media campaigns were centralised into the Cabinet Office, Michael Gove’s sprawling 8,000-plus strong department. By the end of the year, HM Government had become the country’s largest spender for media advertising. My estimate was a total government outlay on advertising for Covid-related purposes in 2020 of approximately £240million.
For media outlets facing a collapse in advertising revenue because of the closure of the economy, the government spending was a lifeline. Whether the Fourth Estate could objectively report on the government’s handling of the virus whilst simultaneously receiving copious funding from that same government was highly debatable.
Since my article in February, more data has come to light. The Cabinet Office has continued spending heavily on Covid media campaigns, mainly through its media buying partner Manning Gottlieb, laying out just over £87million in the first three months of 2021. This brings its Covid advertising spend to more than £280million between April 2020 and March 2021.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus scare, the Cabinet Office’s outlay on Covid media campaigns has increased steadily, with Q1 21’s figure (£87million) being more than double the amount spent in Q2 20 (£42.6million), and up significantly on both Q3 20 (£71.3million) and Q4 20 (£79.7million). (As noted, it was in Q2 20 that the Cabinet Office began centralising Covid-related media programmes.)
Approximately 88 per cent of the Cabinet Office’s advertising spend is done through Manning Gottlieb, with whom the government has had a close working relationship since awarding the company a £800million media buying services contract in October 2018.
At that time Alex Aiken, Executive Director for Government Communications, stated that the government’s communications team sees such media endeavours as an important way to counter ‘disinformation’ and ‘fake news’. As anyone with a decent grasp of history will know, it is of course governments who are the regular purveyors of truth and honesty: the Soviet Union’s Pravda (translating as ‘truth’) being a helpful example of such services rendered to the public by the benevolent state.
However, this is only part of the story. After this large contract, Manning Gottlieb were awarded a further three contracts specifically with the Cabinet Office.
The first of these was in November 2018 at a value of £183million: the primary focus of this appears to have been for media campaigns during the transition period following Britain’s exit from the European Union. Nevertheless, with an end date of 31 May 2022, a proportion of these resources were funnelled into Covid-19 media campaigns.
Subsequently, a £119million contract was signed (effective March 2020) purely for the provision of media buying services for Covid-19 related campaigns. This contract was later extended – until either March or August 2021 (the government’s website is unclear) – by a further £229million, bringing this contract to a total value of £348million.
A third contract, effective 1 April 2021, was signed for the same purpose, Covid-19 media campaigns. This contract is extendable until 21 May 2022 and has a maximum value of £320million. Whether it will be expanded in a similar fashion to the previous contract signed with Manning Gottlieb remains to be seen.
Taken together, the three contracts have a value of £851million. As noted, some of this figure was spent before the pandemic on information campaigns surrounding Brexit. Nevertheless, over the last two quarters Covid advertising spending has outweighed Brexit by a factor of about 4:1. To this sum should be added spending from bodies such as Public Health England before the Cabinet Office’s centralisation efforts, which appears to be in the region of £15million, a figure smaller than I previously estimated.
That said, if the most recent contract with Manning Gottlieb was extended in the same way as the previous one (by an additional £229million), there is no reason why the Cabinet Office’s Covid advertising spend could not hit a total of £1billion over the next year to year-and-a-half.
To put such a sum in perspective, £1billion would buy two years’ supply of vitamin D tablets for the entire UK population. To use a more hackneyed analogy, it would pay the starting salary for more than 40,000 nurses in Our NHS.
One element that remains unknown, however, is how much Manning Gottlieb are paid for these services, since their fees are redacted on the Crown Commercial Service’s website. [p.97]
With a pandemic that appears all but finished – oh, but for an entirely unpredictable ‘Indian variant’ – one wonders what the government will do with hundreds of millions of pounds of advertising through to late May next year. One can only presume that it will be used to browbeat the public into accepting a vaccine for which the majority have no need, or for the increasingly probable reimposition of further lockdowns.
The first of these prompts the question: if you are spending hundreds of millions to persuade people to get a vaccine, perhaps it is not all that necessary in the first place. Were the vaccine of an ordinary type and of indisputable value, I dare say no media campaign at all would be necessary: there is little more than their own health that people care about.
That contracts are projected to last at least another year is indeed worrying. Along with councils advertising positions for ‘Covid marshals’ until 2023, one wonders if the government already has plans for further infringements on our liberties, the timeframe for which has been built into contracts such as those as agreed with Manning Gottlieb. Given the backtracking, twisting and turning that has been displayed to date, it would not appear unlikely.
With a remit to purchase advertising across all media types, companies such as Manning Gottlieb are central to the dissemination of information in the public sphere. It remains an open question whether, while receiving central funds important to their survival, the media will be able or willing to scrutinise government policy, both in the realms of further lockdowns and of the constant bombardment of vaccine propaganda.
The track record so far shows that the vast majority of the media is both unable and unwilling to ask difficult questions surrounding the government’s handling of the pandemic. With hundreds of millions of pounds sloshing around over the next few years, don’t expect that to change any time soon.
NED ‘regime change’ specialists claim credit for Belarus protests, boast of funding Russian opposition during prank call
RT | May 17, 2021
A pair of notorious Russian pranksters posing as leading Belarusian opposition figures have duped the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) into revealing the extent of US involvement in Eastern European political movements.
In a video call posted on the online channel of pranksters Vovan and Lexus, senior representatives of the American agency disclosed that they have actively financed and supported anti-government campaigns in the region. The officials from the NED, which is funded by Congress and describes its role as “supporting freedom around the world,” also revealed that they are coordinating efforts with prominent political activists in a range of countries, including Russia.
The officials believed they were talking to Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the figurehead of Belarus’ opposition movement, and one of her advisors.
During the call, Nina Ognianova, who oversees the NED’s work with local groups in Belarus, outlined the wide-ranging programs the agency bankrolls in the country, insisting that “a lot of the people who have been trained by these hubs, who have been in touch with them and being educated, being involved in their work, have now taken the flag and started to lead in community organizing.”
Ognianova claimed that, through this work, the NED played a role in igniting the colossal street protests that rocked Belarus after long-time leader Alexander Lukashenko declared victory in the country’s presidential election last August. The opposition and many international observers say the vote was rigged in his favor, and tens of thousands took to the streets for demonstrations each weekend after the election.
“We believe that this long-term trust-building that we have had with partners in Belarus has indeed brought the events, or the build-up to the events, of last summer,” Ognianova stated.
“We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere – that it just happened overnight,” she added, “but it has been developing and we have our modest but significant contribution in that by empowering the local actors to do the important work.”
Carl Gershman, the president of the US state-backed agency, told the pranksters that Washington-based funding and policy groups were already working with Tikhanovskaya and her team “very, very closely.” He then asked the opposition figure, who fled to neighboring Lithuania after the election, to set out her thinking on the situation “so we can understand what your strategy is… and how we can be helpful.”
The comments are likely to add fuel to Lukashenko’s previous controversial claims that the widespread domestic opposition to his government is being stoked from abroad.
The pranksters also pushed the NED’s top team to outline their current activity in Russia, asking what they were doing to support anti-Kremlin activists. Gershman replied that such initiatives are “obviously incredibly important and we’ve emphasized this, going back to the election in August when the demonstrations were taking place in the Russian Far East, and people were connecting with each other and saying we share the same ideals, so we’re very committed to helping on that, and we will – working with our networks and our institutes.”
One of the duo, claiming to be Tikhanovskaya’s assistant, questioned this, saying, “I know that NED is prohibited in Russia now,” referencing a 2015 government decision declaring it to be an “undesirable NGO.” A number of the group’s senior leadership team began to laugh, with Gershman insisting “that doesn’t matter. We don’t have offices, we’re not like Freedom House or NDI [the National Democratic Institute] and the IRI [International Republican Institute], we don’t have offices. So if we’re not there, they can’t kick us out.”
“But we support many, many groups and we have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the groups obviously have their partners in exile,” the fund’s president added. “So we are very active and we can be very helpful on this issue.” He added that they were “of course” in touch with Leonid Volkov, a Lithuanian-based activist frequently described as the chief of staff of jailed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny.
Barbara Haig, the deputy to the NED’s president for policy and strategy, also hinted at the potential scale of US funding for political groups, saying, “we have a very ample program in Russia” which “goes even down to the grassroots in provinces – oblasts – outside of Moscow. It is very deep and it is very broad.”
Both she and Gershman expressed concern about Russian military exercises billed to take place alongside Belarusian troops later this year, with Haig asking if the group should be “looking at the deployment of Russian military in the country and how that might be changing over time, and whether we should be raising this with some of our contacts.”
Somewhat ironically, Haig also insisted that opposition groups in Russia are concerned about purported efforts to infiltrate and monitor their activity, saying that “security is a huge issue.” How the NED’s most senior figures came to speak with the pranksters, who kept their cameras turned off and spoke in an unconvincing imitation of Tikhanovskaya’s voice, is unclear.
The pair, whose real names are Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, have previously blagged their way into calls with the likes of Prince Harry, Amnesty International and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. However, they have been accused by some Western commentators of disproportionately targeting opponents of the Kremlin, with their comedy gotchas frequently seeking to generate political controversy.
The NED describes itself as a “private, non-profit, grant-making organization that receives an annual appropriation from the US Congress through the Department of State.” It acknowledges that its “continued funding is dependent on the continued support of the White House and Congress,” but states that its own “independent Board of Directors” is in charge of how the funds are spent. The agency insists that its “independence… also allows it to work with many groups abroad who would hesitate to take funds from the US Government.” Representatives of the NED have been approached for comment.
FDA’s last word on the safety of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine was issued last year/ FDA
By Meryl Nass, MD | May 16, 2021
FDA managed to find 385 adverse event reports for either HCQ or CQ in its FDA adverse event reporting system database, as justification for withdrawing its EUA for the chloroquine drugs.
But there wa something strange about these reports. Only 102 of the 385 reports, or 26%, came from the United States. Why would foreigners be submitting reports of adverse events associated with a chloroquine drug to the FDA, instead of to their own pharmacovigilance system?
According to FDA, “FAERS is a database that contains information on adverse event and medication error reports submitted to FDA.” It is not an international database.
Might FDA have requested that foreign entities submit reports? Might some of those foreign entities have been sites where the HCQ overdose trials were conducted? The big three multicenter overdose trials were Recovery, Solidarity and REMAP-Covid. Page 8 of the FDA report does indicate that some of those patients, for whom adverse event reports were filed, had received excessive HCQ doses. Of a total of 256 reports for which FDA had dosing data, depending where you place the excessive dose cut-off, between 23 and 95 had received high doses.
FDA did a number of different things to suppress the use of hydroxychloroquine. This just happens to be one thing I had not previously reported on.
What else is interesting is that this report was compiled in May 2020. It is attached to a website dated July 2020, ten months ago.
In the intervening 10 months, well over 100 papers have been published on HCQ’s use in Covid. FDA claims, “The FDA’s job is to carefully evaluate the scientific data on a drug to be sure that it is both safe and effective for a particular use…” Yet FDA has ignored this massive amount of accumulating literature on hydroxychloroquine, during which 400,000 Americans died of/with Covid. Why? Willful misconduct?
THE NEW ABNORMAL AND THE CONFLICTED MIND OF JOE NORMIE
Computing Forever | May 13, 2021
Reality Bites Sort Of… | Thomas Sheridan | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFUsPz2b3jo
Watch: Reality Bites Sort Of… | Thomas Sheridan | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFUsPz2b3jo
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